tom denton on math and things.
My favorite games convention has been going through some growing pains over the last couple of weeks. It s a tabletop roleplaying game convention, which presents an interesting resource allocation problem: You have some big number of participants N, and a Continue reading
Stable Diffusion is the best neural text-to-image engine you can run on your own hardware. I recently picked up a new 3090 for my home machine, and spent a couple weekends messing around with Stable Diffusion. Initially, I ve been using Continue reading
I recently stumbled on the Orca sequencer, developed by Hundred Rabbits. It bills itself as an esoteric programming language for writing music. It is purely a sequencer, and has good integration for MIDI and other output types which I haven t Continue reading
Suppose we want to send a message to a friend using as few bits as possible And let s also suppose that this message consists of unit-normally-distributed real numbers. Now, it turns out that it s really really expensive to send arbitrary Continue reading
Suppose you re building a widget that performs some simple action, which ends in either success or failure. You decide it needs to succeed 75% of the time before you re willing to release it. You run ten tests, and see that it succeeds exactly Continue reading
I recently had the pleasure of reading James Scott’s “Seeing Like a State,” which examines a certain strain of failure in large centrally-organized projects. These failures come down to the kinds of knowledge available to administrators and governments: aggregates and Continue reading
I ve just finished reading Turing s Cathedral, an absolutely fascinating book on early computing. The book focuses almost entirely on John von Neumann s Electronic Computer Project carried out at the Institute of Advanced Study in the 40 s and 50 s. In fact, Continue reading
I ve been playing around with Cities: Skylines recently, the super-popular SimCity knock-off. Dealing with traffic is a core theme of the game (as it should be). Traffic tends to accumulate at intersections, and it s well known that one-way streets have Continue reading
I recently read Edward Tufte s Visualizing Quantitative Information, a classic book on visualizing statistical data. It reads a little bit like the Elements of Style for data visualization: Instead of omit needless words, we have maximize data-ink. Indeed, the primary goal of Continue reading
I met up with some mathematician friends in Toronto yesterday, who were interested in how one goes about getting started on machine learning and data science and such. There s piles of great resources out there, of course, but it s probably Continue reading